A haunting new horror novella by award-winning author William Gensburger
Edwin Ransom swore he’d never return to Sweetwater Fields — but a friend’s funeral brings him and his fiancée back to the small town he fled, where a cemetery orchard grows apples the size of a grapefruit, fed, locals whisper, by the souls of the dead. No one eats the fruit. Everyone has a secret. And by the time Edwin uncovers the town’s oldest lie, it may already have claimed something of his own.
This horror novella has attracted a lot of attention. It isn’t graphic, but it is suspenseful, unsettling, and built around the kind of secret that grows more disturbing the closer Edwin gets to the truth.
“A creepy town with creepy people. I love it. Kept me page turning”
— Joseph Kandler
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EXCERPT
Across the street was the cemetery wall, and behind it, filling almost the entire window, the tree — the same one from the road, red and impossibly heavy with fruit, close enough now that Edwin could pick out individual apples the unnatural size of a grapefruit, hanging low enough on some branches to brush the top of the wall.
Claire stood there a moment, looking at it, her hands still braced on the windowsill.
“You wanted to come,” Edwin said, from behind her.
“You were coming for your friend’s funeral. It made sense for me to be with you.” She didn’t turn around. “That’s all it was.”
“I might not have come at all, if you hadn’t pushed for it.”
That did turn her around. “You never talk about your childhood,” she said. “Not once, not really, not in two years. I want to know everything about the man I’m going to marry, Edwin. Is that so strange?”
He crossed the room and kissed her before he answered, and for a moment the closeness of the room and the sweetness coming through the window both fell away.
“I love you,” she said, against his mouth.
“I love you too.” He drew back just far enough to see her face. “There weren’t many good memories here. That’s all it is.”
She held his eyes a moment longer, decided to let it rest there for now, and turned back to her suitcase, unzipping it, laying blouses out across the bedspread with the brisk, determined efficiency of a woman who had resolved to make the best of a place that wasn’t making it easy for her.
On the nightstand between the two beds sat a small ceramic bowl, and in it, two apples.
They were enormous — the same impossible size as the fruit on the tree outside, red going almost to black at the shoulders, skin so tight and glossy it looked lacquered rather than grown.
Claire reached for one, turning from the suitcase without looking, the way a person reaches for fruit in a bowl without thinking twice about it.
“Don’t,” Edwin said, faster than he meant to.
She stopped, her hand still extended. “Why not?”
“Just — don’t. Trust me.”
She looked at the apple instead of touching it now, studying its size the way she might study a number that didn’t add up. “I’ve never seen apples this big in my life.”
He told her, then, the way it had been told to him a long time ago, standing in this same room or one very much like it: the tree in the cemetery, older than the town itself according to some, and the belief that had grown up around it and never quite died, the way beliefs don’t in towns small enough to keep them alive on nothing but repetition — that because the tree grew where it grew, out of that particular ground, the souls of the dead went into it. Into the roots, and up through the wood, and out into the fruit.
Claire’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You don’t actually believe that.”
“Have you seen apples that big before, anywhere, in your whole life?”
She looked at the one in the bowl a moment longer. Then she set her hand back at her side, and didn’t pick it up, and turned instead to finish unpacking, folding a blouse over her arm, smoothing it flat before laying it across the bed beside the others.